Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Job Offer?

The prevailing job-hunting acumen for computer science students
during the late '90s and early 2000 was that you didn't need tojob
hunt, that is. A new graduate with a warm body and half a brain could
attract multiple job offers with high salaries and great benefits.
Because, as the wisdom went, employers were desperate to hire.

Good news, says the Information Technology Association of America
(ITAA). Even in the midst of an economic slump, things haven't changed
too much. In April, the ITAA, the largest trade association of tech
employers in the United States, released an extensive survey of 685 IT
hiring managers. The report noted that although the numbers were down
from over a million last year, there were still 425,000 IT jobs that
would go unfilled this year, due to a lack of qualified IT personnel.
And that doesn't include the 900,000 jobs hiring managers say they plan
to fill this year.

But maybe we should back up for a second, because with our current
economic downturn (and the crashing tech stock market) one might think
that the ITAA would be singing a sad song. Tech companies and the media
make seemingly daily announcements of massive layoffs and hiring
freezes. Giants such as Lucent, Motorola, Dell, Intel, 3Com, Nortel, and
Texas Instruments, to name just a few, have hemorrhaged workers by the
thousands.

And let's not forget about the dotcoms' misfortunes. As of early
July, e-business magazine The Industry Standard estimated that over
127,716 ebusiness jobs had been cut by 862 companies, a toll that rises
daily.

Some companies have gone so far as to try to convince their recently
hired college graduates not to come to work for them after all. Intel,
for example, recently offered to pay its new hires to not take the jobs
they were offered. Those who didn't take the payment and went to Intel
anyway were told they would probably be reassigned to a position they
hadn't accepted. Cisco Systems rescinded 25% of its job offers to
college graduates, handing them a "severance" package of 12 weeks pay
and help finding work elsewhere.

Yet the ITAA is certain IT jobs all over the country will go
unfilled, and they have numerous allies on their side of the debate. The
Meta Group, for example, an IT business research and consulting firm,
estimates through its own polling that 600,000 IT jobs will go
unfilled175,000 more than ITAA is estimating.

And even though the nation's unemployment rate rises by the month, it
remains low and static for tech workers. According to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS), the unemployment rate for the first quarter of
2001 was 2.6 for computer systems analysts and an astonishingly low 2.0
for programmers, while the national rate was 4.2. According to the ITAA,
every field is desperate, not just IT positions that don't necessarily
require a computer science degree to perform, such as tech support.

So what's going on here? Is there really a shortage of qualified IT
workers to fill the demand? Will a steady pulse be the only requirement
job-hunting students need to land one of the thousands of IT positions
supposedly available for the taking? Or should students worry that when
they graduate, they'll have to take any IT job they can find, even if it
means taking a less desirable position? The answers are vague and
constantly debated, but understanding the data that's out there will
help you determine the hiring outlook you'll face at graduation.

The Tech Shortage's Wet Blanket

By far the most well-known detractor of the industry's claim of a tech
shortage is Norman Matloff. The computer science professor at the
University of California, Davis, has earned a reputation by being the
ITAA's contrarian, declaring the tech shortage is just a myth (even
during the glory years of 1997 to early 2000). He's also an outspoken
critic of the H-1B visa, which allows foreign workersmostly those
specializing in IT and programmingto work in the U.S. for up to
six years. He claims the visas take programming and other IT positions
away from U.S. workers, who are struggling to find these jobs in the
first place. His editorials on the subjects have appeared in the New
York Times, the Washington Post and Forbes and he has been profiled in
U.S. News & World Report.

Matloff's testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee on Immigration, "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software
Labor Shortage," was presented April 21, 1998, and he's constantly
updated it since then. (For the most current version, visit http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html).
It is a long and comprehensive manifesto that attempts to deflate every truth we thought we knew of the
tech shortage and answer every question we've ever had about the labor
gap. Examples: "In all this 'high-tech labor shortage' talk, what kinds
of workers are we discussing?" (His answer: Mostly programmers and
software engineers, the most sought after and highly skilled IT jobs.)
"Don't low unemployment rates among programmers indicate a labor
shortage?" (Matloff: No, because programmers who can't find work in IT
are forced to find it elsewhere.) And, most importantly, "How can we
evaluate all these conflicting claims about whether a high-tech labor
shortage exists or does not exist?"

His answer: Perform a simple experiment. Call up the human resources
manager for any tech firm that hires programmers and "ask if they reject
the vast majority of applicants." (By applicants, Matloff means those
that simply send in a resume, whether a job was advertised for or not,
because "they should be hiring any programmer, as long as they're a good
programmer.") Once the H.R. person says yes, "Ask them why they do this,
and they will say the vast majority of the applicants don't have some
new software skill set the employer wants, even though the applicants
have years of programming experience."

Matloff says he's found that companies typically offer jobs to, at
most, 2% to 3% of applicants and reject the rest, most of those without
even an interview. He says he's called two to three dozen companies,
using the same questions with each h.r. person he surveys (to help
achieve, he says, a statistically valid conclusion), and each has
responded the same way. This evidence does seem to put a bit of a wrench
into the ITAA's numbers, because it goes to the sourcetech hiring
managers. If there is a shortage, why has every company he's contacted
turned away many qualified applicants? "The competence in programming is
all that should matter," he says.

But Matloff goes further in his argument, claiming that of those that
get an interview, very few are offered a position. He cites several
newspaper studies and personal interviews with 18 companies ranging from
Broderbund to Microsoft that hire from under 5% to half of interviewed
applicantsand that was done two years ago, when the job market was
supposedly red-hot. "Now, I'm sure it's much lower," he says.

But what about salaries, weren't those rising rapidly during the tech
job boom? No, says Matloff. Salary increases in the tech industry have
only been around 7% to 8% per year since 1990, according to several
salary surveys and government economic gauges, including BLS data. "And
though figures like 7% or 8% are a few percentage points above
inflation, they are still very mild. If employers were as desperate to
hire as they claim, they would certainly be willing to pay a premium of
more than 7%."

Accounting, sales, marketing, business administration and other
professions have had salary increases two to three times that of
programmers during the same time span, says Matloff. "When the industry
claims a shortage of programmers, what they mean is a shortage of cheap
programmers," Matloff writes in his testimony.

To hear Matloff tell it, there's not a shortage of workers, but a
shortage of jobs. But he's not the only person claiming the tech
shortage has been overblown. Dr. Robert I. Lerman, a professor of
economics at American University, gave a 1998 report to the U.S. Senate
claiming the evidence of a tech gap was inconclusive, citing, among
other things, lack of salary increases and an industry that didn't take
significant steps to retain workers. He found that there were plenty of
trained and experienced workers who could fill IT job openings. "Several
IT occupations are expanding rapidly but the supply networks have proved
reasonably successful in absorbing the demand," he concluded.

Even the investigative arm of Congressthe U.S. General
Accounting Office (GAO)agrees with Matloff and Lerman's findings.
In their September 2000 report, "H-1B Foreign Workers: Better Controls
Needed to Help Employers and Protect Workers," the GAO criticized the
surveys provided by the ITAA and other associations because they
"provide little information about these vacancies, such as how long
positions were vacant, whether sufficient wages to attract workers were
offered, or whether companies considered jobs filled by contractors as
vacancies." Because of this, they concluded, "definitional and
methodological problems in these studies [that] do not permit a
conclusion as to the extent of any IT skill shortage."

The question then becomes, if those were the statistics and hiring
outlooks then, how can the ITAA and other organizations still claim a
shortage now?

The Other Side

"Anyone who has been active either on the supply side or the demand side
has no question about the [tech labor] gap," says Ed Lazowska, professor
and chair of the department of computer science and engineering at the
University of Washington, Seattle. "It is simply loony to suggest there
has not been a gap."

Lazowska's got a good bench from which to judge: His department is
one of the Seattle area's main arteries for entry-level IT employment,
filtering students into companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Boeing.
Lazowska cites studies conducted by the ITAA, the Computing Research
Association, the Department of Labor, the National Research Council and
the Washington Software Alliance that indicate there is a shortage of
skilled IT workers. And, he says, his own students have never had
trouble finding the jobs they want.

However, says Lazowska, this year's slumping economy and tech layoffs
have somewhat slowed hiring, especially for students seeking
internships. He surveyed his graduating students in May to assess their
success in job and internship searches. The results: "Many smaller
companies have suddenly cancelled their internship programs for the
summer, so there are students who thought they were set for the summer
but suddenly were not," he says. "The reason is that these companies
have had to reduce staff, and there would be adverse morale impacts from
bringing in interns." Lazowska points out, though, that larger firms
such as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are still seeking interns.

With the boom and bust economy on the bust side, students now need to
actively seek out jobs. "Students at UW have not had to job hunt for the
past few years; they have been able to sit around and literally have
great employers find their resumes on the Web and extend them offers."
But things have changed. "Those days are over. If you sit on your
keister, you are not going to get a job."

The weakened economy has forced companies to be pickier when hiring,
and, says Lazowska, "the strongest companies have always been highly
selective, and they are even more so today. Companies such as Microsoft
and Intel and the hot startups can be even more picky than before in
terms of who they hire."

So what of Matloff's survey of human resource directors, which sought
to determine the number of applications that get tossed aside? "That is
such a non-sensical experiment, I don't even think it's worth paying
attention to," says Dr. Peter Freeman, Georgia Tech's dean of computer
sciences. "That's like saying I spit in the wind and it blew in my face,
so I guess we're having a hurricane."

"Anybody can apply for a job. I mean, the obvious rejoinder would be
that when there are high paying jobs there are, of course, going to be
lots of people applying for them," Freeman says. "If Matloff would care
to carry out a scientific study of things, I might be willing to
(extensively) comment."

Matloff, in his defense, says that his prior career as a statistician
forces him to be careful with data that he uses. "When I work with data,
I'm not doing it casually," he says. "The sample size for my employer
survey IS large enough to make a statistically valid conclusion."
"Related to that, as for 'anybody can apply for a job,' I ask hiring
managers to only count people that have experience as professional
programmers."

The argument over rejected yet qualified applicants may be impossible
to quantify, but salaries are not. So if companies are still desperate,
why haven't salaries risen to compensate? Lazowska attributes the lack
of increase to stock options added to base salaries. "Students who take
jobs in this industry are hoping that they are accepting a relatively
modest paycheck/wage, in return for a huge dollop of deferred
compensation via their stock options," he says.

Matloff, however, in his testimony to Congress, disagrees with this,
saying that the value of stock options aren't rising with salaries. TThe
median value of stock options only rose $2,900 between 1996 and 1998,
certainly not enough to support the ITAA's claims of dramatic increases
in overall compensation."

This year, Lazowska's students tell him that while job offers are
down, salaries are up, perhaps as a response to worthless options. (As a
side note, a few organizations in the IT industry, including the Meta
Group and the ITAA, have been pushing for tech salaries to level off or
even start falling. The Meta Group, for example, wrote in a CNET.com
editorial that IT workers "still cost too much.")

And, while the media is quick to point out how many people have been
laid off, often they fail to report how many are getting hired at the
same time. (Companies frequently fail to report that data, too.)
"Oftentimes what doesn't get promoted or publicized as much is the
number of downsized workers who do find new positions or companies that
continue to hire in the midst of this economic downturn," says the
ITAA's vice president of work force development Marjorie Bynum.

Take, for example, the job slaughter in the dotcom sector. That, says
Meta Group program director Maria Schaffer, is misleading. Dotcom
employment accounts for only 1% of total IT jobs. "You've got huge
corporations out there that not only are not laying anybody off, but
they are still trying very harddesperately in some casesto
find those critical skills that are still missing," she says. "And
that's the other thing that's been misrepresented. It's a skill
issue."

She's right, it is a skill issue. Actually, a specific skill set
issue, because what's gotten lost in the shuffle these past few years is
that companies have gotten pickier for the specific skills they want
their new hires to possess. Just open your Sunday want ads for computer
programming positions; companies aren't just looking for knowledge of
basic languages, but ability to execute a variety of coding and IT
skillsall of them minute and constrained to the company's needs.
And maybe one of the reasons that the shortage exists is that few
workers can meet such specific requirements, and the unfilled job gets
listed into the ITAA's study.

And if you think a company will gladly train you in these skills,
even if you're an experienced IT worker, think again. If a company is
given a choice between the applicant that already has the skill set and
the one that needs training, guess who's going to get the job.

Shortage or Not, You Still Have to Find a Job

Despite the debate over the shortage, nearly everyone agrees that it's
more difficult for a college senior studying computer science to find a
desirable job now than when they tried two to three years ago. But some
things haven't changed: If you're a star in your class with top grades,
internships and other extra-curricular activities to put on your resume,
you shouldn't have a problem. Nevertheless, middle-of-the-road students
may still find fortune if they have the one trait that every employer
seeks: experience. "It has never been possible to get a job in
Washington's computing industry with a degree and no experience," says
Lazowska.

Matloff agrees that having internship experience is critical to
finding a desirable job, but also stresses the importance of having
computer science professors assist the students in finding the
positions, and that means they have to understand and study what
employers are looking for. "One of the most important byproducts of this
whole mess is the failure of computer science departments, both
administrators and faculty, to pay real attention to the job market," he
says. "That would be fine for a philosophy department, but computer
science is by nature a jobs-oriented major, and I say that computer
science departments have a responsibility here."

And if you want a programming job but are only able to find other
tech positions, such as a tech support? "Keep pestering your boss to
give you at least some programming work. Be polite but very persistent,"
says Matloff. "The longer you are in a non-programming job, the harder
it will be to ever break into the programming field."

Brandon G. Stahl is a former editor of Graduating Engineer & Computer Careers.